The New Hacker's Dictionary

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bottom-up implementation n.

Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design'. It has been received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. Naively applied, this leads to hacked-together bottom-up implementations; a more sophisticated response is `middle-out implementation', in which scratch code within primitives at the mid-level of the system is gradually replaced with a more polished version of the lowest level at the same time the structure above the midlevel is being built.

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Node:bounce, Next:[1838]bounce message, Previous:[1839]bottom-up implementation, Up:[1840]= B =

bounce v.

1. [common; perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'. See also [1841]bounce message. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. The now-demolished [1842]D. C. Power Lab building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s had a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 would come over the intercom the cry: "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!", followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known

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volleyballers. 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob. from the expression `bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's psychosexually loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. Compare [1843]boink. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among [1844]VMS and [1845]Unix users. 5. [VM/CMS programmers] Automatic warm-start of a machine after an error. "I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7 times during the night" 6. [IBM] To [1846]power cycle a peripheral in order to reset it.

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Node:bounce message, Next:[1847]boustrophedon, Previous:[1848]bounce, Up:[1849]= B =

bounce message n.

[common] Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay [1850]email to the intended [1851]Internet address recipient or the next link in a [1852]bang path (see [1853]bounce, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a [1854]down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see [1855]sorcerer's apprentice mode and [1856]software laser. The terms `bounce mail' and `barfmail' are also common.

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boustrophedon n.

[from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form

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`boustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this).

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box n.

1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `Unix box', `MS-DOS box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up to the mainframe." 2. [IBM] Without qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM [1863]mainframe to communicate beyond the limits of the [1864]dinosaur pen. Typically used in expressions like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like the [1865]box has fallen over." (See [1866]fall over.) See also [1867]IBM, [1868]fear and loathing, [1869]Blue Glue.

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boxed comments n.

Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this:

/************************************************* * * This is a boxed comment in C style *

*************************************************/

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Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in column 2 or add a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the `box' is implied. Oppose [1873]winged comments.

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boxen /bok'sn/ pl.n.

[very common; by analogy with [1877]VAXen] Fanciful plural of [1878]box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity [1879]Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.

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boxology /bok-sol'*-jee/ n.

Syn. [1883]ASCII art. This term implies a more restricted domain, that of box-and-arrow drawings. "His report has a lot of boxology in it." Compare [1884]macrology.

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bozotic /boh-zoh'tik/ or /boh-zo'tik/ adj.

[from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously

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Node:break, Next:[1928]break-even point, Previous:[1929]bread crumbs, Up:[1930]= B =

break

1. vt. To cause to be [1931]broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands." 2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place where it stops is a `breakpoint'. 3. [techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial comm line. 4. [Unix] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3), delete or [1932]control-C does this. 5. `break break' may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze a few years ago.

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break-even point n.

In the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at which the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement the language in itself. That is, for a new language called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL, discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use working versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important milestone; see [1936]MFTL.

Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol floating around on various [1937]VAXen in the early and mid-1980s. A FOOGOL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum

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Breidbart Index /bri:d'bart ind*ks/

A measurement of the severity of spam invented by long-time hacker Seth Breidbart, used for programming cancelbots. The Breidbart Index takes into account the fact that excessive multi-posting [1951]EMP is worse than excessive cross-posting [1952]ECP. The Breidbart Index is computed as follows: For each article in a spam, take the square-root of the number of newsgroups to which the article is posted. The Breidbart Index is the sum of the square roots of all of the posts in the spam. For example, one article posted to nine newsgroups and again to sixteen would have BI = sqrt(9) + sqrt(16) = 7. It is generally agreed that a spam is cancelable if the Breidbart Index exceeds 20.

The Breidbart Index accumulates over a 45-day window. Ten articles yesterday and ten articles today and ten articles tomorrow add up to a 30-article spam. Spam fighters will often reset the count if you can convince them that the spam was accidental and/or you have seen the error of your ways and won't repeat it. Breidbart Index can accumulate over multiple authors. For example, the "Make Money Fast" pyramid scheme exceeded a BI of 20 a long time ago, and is now considered "cancel on sight".

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Node:bring X to its knees, Next:[1953]brittle, Previous:[1954]Breidbart Index, Up:[1955]= B =

bring X to its knees v.

[common] To present a machine, operating system, piece of software, or algorithm with a load so extreme or [1956]pathological that it grinds to a halt. "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running [1957]vi -- or four running [1958]EMACS." Compare [1959]hog.